Here I lay for the space of many days a close prisoner, and not
only got my health again, but came to know my companions. They
were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are: being men rooted
out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss
together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel. There
were some among them that had sailed with the pirates and seen
things it would be a shame even to speak of; some were men that
had run from the king's ships, and went with a halter round their
necks, of which they made no secret; and all, as the saying goes,
were "at a word and a blow" with their best friends. Yet I had
not been many days shut up with them before I began to be ashamed
of my first judgment, when I had drawn away from them at the
Ferry pier, as though they had been unclean beasts. No class of
man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues;
and these shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. Rough
they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many
virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even
beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some
glimmerings of honesty.

There was one man, of maybe forty, that would sit on my berthside
for hours and tell me of his wife and child. He was a fisher
that had lost his boat, and thus been driven to the deep-sea
voyaging. Well, it is years ago now: but I have never forgotten
him. His wife (who was "young by him," as he often told me)
waited in vain to see her man return; he would never again make
the fire for her in the morning, nor yet keep the bairn when she
was sick. Indeed, many of these poor fellows (as the event
proved) were upon their last cruise; the deep seas and cannibal
fish received them; and it is a thankless business to speak ill
of the dead.

Among other good deeds that they did, they returned my money,
which had been shared among them; and though it was about a third
short, I was very glad to get it, and hoped great good from it in
the land I was going to. The ship was bound for the Carolinas;
and you must not suppose that I was going to that place merely as
an exile. The trade was even then much depressed; since that,
and with the rebellion of the colonies and the formation of the
United States, it has, of course, come to an end; but in those
days of my youth, white men were still sold into slavery on the
plantations, and that was the destiny to which my wicked uncle
had condemned me.

The cabin-boy Ransome (from whom I had first heard of these
atrocities) came in at times from the round-house, where he
berthed and served, now nursing a bruised limb in silent agony,
now raving against the cruelty of Mr. Shuan. It made my heart
bleed; but the men had a great respect for the chief mate, who
was, as they said, "the only seaman of the whole jing-bang, and
none such a bad man when he was sober." Indeed, I found there
was a strange peculiarity about our two mates: that Mr. Riach was
sullen, unkind, and harsh when he was sober, and Mr. Shuan would
not hurt a fly except when he was drinking. I asked about the
captain; but I was told drink made no difference upon that man of
iron.

I did my best in the small time allowed me to make some thing
like a man, or rather I should say something like a boy, of the
poor creature, Ransome. But his mind was scarce truly human. He
could remember nothing of the time before he came to sea; only
that his father had made clocks, and had a starling in the
parlour, which could whistle "The North Countrie;" all else had
been blotted out in these years of hardship and cruelties. He
had a strange notion of the dry land, picked up from sailor's
stories: that it was a place where lads were put to some kind of
slavery called a trade, and where apprentices were continually
lashed and clapped into foul prisons. In a town, he thought
every second person a decoy, and every third house a place in
which seamen would be drugged and murdered. To be sure, I would
tell him how kindly I had myself been used upon that dry land he
was so much afraid of, and how well fed and carefully taught both
by my friends and my parents: and if he had been recently hurt,
he would weep bitterly and swear to run away; but if he was in
his usual crackbrain humour, or (still more) if he had had a
glass of spirits in the roundhouse, he would deride the notion.